How The Kafka Project Handles Clients

Starting with the 0.8 release we are maintaining all but the jvm client external to the main code base. The reason for this is that it allows a small group of implementers who know the language of that client to quickly iterate on their code base on their own release cycle. Having these maintained centrally was becoming a bottleneck as the main committers can't hope to know every possible programming language to be able to perform meaningful code review and testing. This lead to a scenario where the committers were attempting to review and test code they didn't understand.

We are instead moving to the redis/memcached model which seems to work better at supporting a rich ecosystem of high quality clients.

We haven't tried all these clients and can't vouch for them. The normal rules of open source apply.

If you are aware of other clients not listed here (or are the author of such a client), please add it here. Please also feel free to help fill out information on the features the client supports, level of activity of the project, level of documentation, etc.

For 0.8.x

The 0.8 release changes the protocol fairly substantially. The new protocol is documented here.